by Jamie Harrop

Jamie stepped upon the Web development scene in 1999 where he became to be a firm believer in Web accessibility and standards. He has since gained a reputation in this field of expertise and now owns his own successful Web development company, WY Media.

To Dream, Weave, or Read The Front Page?

What are they?

What You See Is What You Get Editors (Referred to as WYSIWYG editors
from here after) are programs that have been written specifically to
aid in the development of Websites and their components, I say
components as in this day and age database management and script setup
have major parts to play within the editors.

Many beginners to the Web development scene believe WYSIWYG editors are
a real lifesaver, so did I when I first stepped upon this impressive
adventure, (that some call Web development), and I hate to say it, but
I guess eight or nine out of ten people were in the same situation as
me. As you begin to advance and talk to fellow Web developers, of whom
have a little more experience than yourself, you begin to wonder if
WYSIWYG editors are the way to go. The aim of this rant is to save you
from wasting time learning the ins and outs (and shake it all abouts if
you like) of WYSIWYG editors, instead, skip this stage, in the next ten
minutes you will realise that WYSIWYG editors are not the way to go.

What do they do?

In the simplest terms, they allow the end user to ‘drag and drop’
elements of a Website including images, text and scripts. ‘Drag and
drop’ is quite a broad term to use as it covers things such as the
standard insert picture tool. By all means, there are methods of
dragging a button and inserting it on your Website to insert something
specific such as an effect or script but it also covers those other
things.

Despite the main aim of WYSIWYG editors been to allow the end user to
see their Web page developing as they develop and make the whole
process simpler (some may argue, me included as you will find out) they
also have a ‘coding’ tab where you can hardcode your web site. This
hard coding within the editor is fine with me and most other web
developers, just as long as you don't mix the WYSIWYG interface with
the hard coding interface.

Examples!

There are many different WYSIWYG editors around. The two that are
considered to be the most well known are Microsoft FrontPage and
Macromedia Dreamweaver. FrontPage comes now with most Microsoft Office
packages whereas Dreamweaver is available for download at a hefty cost
of $400 from Macromedia’s web site.

Before I go on let me put things straight regarding Macromedia
Dreamweaver. Macromedia have done a very good job, compared to
Microsoft with Frontpage, in abiding by standards and accessibility
guidelines. I certainly won't go and say they haven't because it isn't
true, I am also aware that Dreamweaver can be configured to produce
valid code amongst other things. Therefore, I will say here, as long as
the developer knows how to handle Dreamweaver to get it to abide by the
things I rant about here, I have no problem with it.

Why Am I Against Them?

I am a firm believer in abiding by W3C’s Web standards as well as
trying my best to allow for maximum accessibility within Websites.
Generally, WYSIWYG editors, upon designing in the WYSIWYG interface
rather than hard coding, do not stick to these beliefs I, and many
other Web developers have. A side note, it is not me and the other
developers been awkward, we are, in theory, doing the correct thing by
developing Websites according to standards and taking accessibility
issues in to account. By doing this we do much more than help the user,
often we actually help ourselves in matters such as the possibility of
a visitor suing the Web developer as they cannot access the Website.
This can be, and has been done successfully.

Take Microsoft FrontPage for example, I am not 'attacking' Microsoft
here at all (that is my next rant) but because FrontPage and Internet
Explorer are both Microsoft products, many of the features that
FrontPage harnesses are built in to the system to work specifically and
solely within Internet Explorer and no other browsers.

Based on published figures, Internet Explorer harnesses somewhere in
the region of 90% of all Web users (as I and many developers have said
before, we would love to challenge this figure, but, as of yet, there
is no information to back our opinions, partly the reason why Microsoft
and others can continue to present the 90% figure). So, that is at
least 10% of your visitors down the drain, bang, bye bye. Now, lets put
this in to perspective, 10% may not seem like a great deal. But, think,
lets say a Website receives 10,000 visitors per month (may sound a lot,
in fact, quite an achievable number). That is 1000 visitors the site
could miss out on per month. Now, lets say that the web site is an
online store, before hand, the company had done some research and
worked out that on average 65% of their visitors to their web site
bought a product, that means the company would have lost out on 650
sales in each month if their Website is accessible via Internet
Explorer alone. Now, if you are a positive thinking person and are
still not convinced that FrontPage is a bad thing, lets assume the
company did some more research, they worked out that on average a
product from them costs $15. So, 650 multiplied by 15 is 9750. That
means the company will lose out on $9750, on average, each month. That
is $117,000 (One Hundred and Seventeen Thousand Dollars) per year. Here
is the killer punch, the average lifespan of a business is 100 years
(or so some people say), so, 117,000 multiplied by 100 equals:
$1,170,000 (One Million One Hundred Seventy Thousand Dollars). This is
how much a business could lose out on during its lifespan. In shock
yet? Here is the number for your local emergency services, 911.

With that said I will continue to talk about WYSIWYG editors in general
rather than singling out FrontPage. Another reason for my hatred is the
fact they generate code that, well to put it simply, is a shambles. It
is not so much the fact that the code they produce is not valid,
although that would improve it significantly, but it is the way there
is so much pointless coding and useless nonsense inserted within the
source. I often see Web pages designed with WYSIWYG editors that
contain so many tables they wouldn't fit in to The Queens dining room!
I often wonder to myself whether it is the program that sucks big time
or whether it is the programmers who inserted the commands to create
the source that suck, I suppose, thought about accurately, it has to be
the programmer behind the editor that is poor as it is the programmer
that creates the program, I am sure that will be challenged by the
programmers themselves though.

Despite all my ranting about accessibility issues, Dreamweaver, for
one, has attempted to do something about it, certainly a lot more than
what FrontPage has. Macromedia’s web site has a whole section dedicated
to Dreamweaver’s accessibility, http://www.macromedia.com/macromedi...sibility/mx/dw/ It’s quite ironic though that Macromedia’s order section does not allow the user access while using Opera.

Specific Advantages Of WYSIWYG Editors

Not many, but I have managed to come up with a few:

Efficiency

- Some will say that it improves efficiency, I tend
to disagree from my level as I would always have the need to come back
and correct the code and bugs, therefore increasing the time taken to
develop the Website. For those not bothered with accessibility and
standards (I'm tempted to say you must not care about your visitors
either, woops, I just did) then this probably won't affect you, God
forbid if you take this route even after my rant above.

Education Of HTML

- Valid point, it does not require the need
for the end user to know or even understand HTML and its subsidiary
languages. But, if you ask me, learning HTML is far less complicated
than dealing with customer complaints in the form of them not been able
to access your Website.

Specific Disadvantages Of Using WYSIWYG Editors

Notice how these outweigh the advantages:

Standards

- Most, if not all WYSIWYG editors do not comply with
Web standards. I haven't actually gone through the advantages of
complying with standards but here is an interesting one I found from an
external source, "Complying with Web standards can give your Web pages
greater visibility in Web searches. The structural information present
in compliant documents makes it easy for search engines to access and
evaluate the information in those documents and they get indexed more
accurately." Source: Webstandards.org This could once again come down
to revenue, depending on your business type, been high in search engine
rankings could effect how much revenue you receive, complying to
standards, according to the source above, helps search engines access
and evaluate the information within your Website.

Accessibility

- If you decided you would only read this section
of the rant be sure to add another to the read list, the 'Why Am I
Against Them?' section has a very clean idea on how accessibility
issues can cost you and your company big bucks.

Half-Baked Coding

- As explained above, the coding is usually
pretty shoddy. This may not be a big deal for the likes of a beginner
but within the Web development industry, visual design is not
everything. The underlying brick and mortar is your key to the first
half of success.

Valid Coding

- To add to the poor coding you could try running a
Website made in a WYSIWYG editor through a validator. I could almost
bet my left hand (I need it to keep boring so many people with rants
like this) that you would be thrown a handful of ugly errors. Obviously
those Dreamweaver gurus who understand and use the program effectively
can argue with good grounds on this point.